proached.

[348] My very amiable reviewer thinks that eighteenth-century French
society _did_ behave _a la Laclos_. I don't, though I think it did _a la
Crebillon_.

CHAPTER X

DUMAS THE YOUNGER

[Sidenote: Division of future subjects.]

No one who has not had some experience in writing literary
history knows the difficulties--or perhaps I should say the
"unsatisfactorinesses"--which attend the shepherding of examples into
separate chronological folds. But every one who has had that experience
knows that mere neglect to attempt this shepherding has serious
drawbacks. In such cases there is nothing for it but a famous phrase,
"We will do what we can." An endeavour has been made in the last chapter
to show that, about the middle of the nineteenth century, a noteworthy
change _did_ pass over French novel-literature. In a similar retrospect,
at the end of the volume and the _History_, we may be able, _si Dieu
nous prete vie_, to show that this change was not actually succeeded by
any other of equal importance as far as our own subject goes. But the
stage had, like all such things, sub-stages; and there must be
corresponding breaks, if only mechanical ones, in the narrative, to
avoid the distasteful "blockiness" resulting from their absence. After
several changes of plan I have thought it best to divide what remains of
the subject into five chapters (to which a separate Conclusion may be
added). The first of these will be allotted, for reasons to be given, to
Alexandre Dumas _fils_; the second to Gustave Flaubert, greatest by far,
if not most representative, of all dealt with in this latter part of the
volume; the third to others specially of the Second Empire, but not
specially of the Naturalist School; the fourth to that School itself;
and the fifth to those now defunct novelists of the Third Republic, up
to the close of the century, who may not have been dealt with before.

* * * * *

There should not, I think, be much doubt that we ought to begin with
Alexandre Dumas, the son, who--though he launched his most famous novel
five years before Napoleon the Third made himself come to the throne,
had been writing for about as many earlier still, and lived till long
after the Terrible Year, and almost to the end of our own tether--is yet
almost more essentially _the_ novelist of the Second Empire than any one
else, not merely because before its end he practically gave up Novel for